I’m very happy with the weight system on the XDeep Stealth 2.0 Tec sidemount harness. It has pockets along the spine so you can usually achieve perfect trim by moving a few blocks up or down. The lower center of gravity with sidemounted tanks helps as well of course. In fact, diving sidemount was the first time I experienced proper trim. The Mares jacket BCD I had before didn’t have enough flexibility. It had integrated weight pockets but they were too far down for me, leading to a vertical position.
What about the amount of 2.16 kg/4.76 lbs mass of air you will have less (in my example: 12 lit. x 150 bar gas-consumption) when you come back to surface at 50 bar at the end of a dive? As you get on shallower depth you will become increasingly buoyant and it may be possible to shoot out of the water without a safety stop, especially if you are wearing a 7mm wetsuit ... Therefore I think you have to calculate additional weight to compensate this fact for safety reasons!
By far the best way to reduce the amount of weight one has to carry is to lose weight. I got way too fat over the years so decided to lose some fat. I lost 23kg and went from carrying 8kg of weight to 4kg. Dive time also increased by almost double as well.
I must be missing something. I want to be neutrally buoyant at my safety stop at the end of the dive so I don’t have an uncontrolled ascent in the last 5m. During the dive I let out about 3kg of air from my steel 12L tank (lost weight) so I would be 3Kg more positively buoyant near the safety stop (if I was neutral at the start of the dive) - not a good thing! Does this not mean that I need to be 3kg negatively buoyant at the beginning of the dive, not neutral? Here is an excerpt from DAN that I just found after writing the comment. There is some debate about whether divers should weight themselves to be neutrally buoyant at the surface or in shallow water. Divers who are neutrally buoyant at the surface may be significantly positively buoyant in shallow water towards the end of the dive when their cylinders are nearly empty and are, therefore, lighter. The amount of positive buoyancy depends largely on the type and thickness of exposure suit and the type and size of cylinder used. This positive buoyancy may make it difficult to maintain your desired safety stop or decompression stop depth at the end of the dive. You can minimize positive buoyancy at the stop by adjusting for neutral buoyancy with a near-empty tank, rather than a full one.
2 kilos on the belt... Lucky you! I need 18 when diving in a drysuit and that's a lot to carry around when you are outside of the water. And yes, i am big and too fat.
Just completed peak bouyancy in my advanced open water. We found out with a steel 108, i only need 2 pounds in trim pouches. 4 lbs for aluminum 80. This is after adjusting tank location. And we were in fresh water.
183 cm height, 90kg weight, wing style bcd, I put 800g on the left, 800 on the right and 800 on the tank strap for trim. 2.4kg in total. That’s with aluminium tank and a rashguard in salt water. With steel tank I did not need weights at all. I believe when I started off during my OW days I was using 5kg (and my body fat was way lower too lol), so it was just a setup I ended up with after 200+ dives over years 🙂
I haven't gone diving since I got my OW certification back in March. During that time my instructor had me use 8lbs. He said that he intentionally gave us a higher amount than what we probably need so that it's easier for us to sit at the bottom when working on certain skills. When I finally get a chance to go diving again I'll probably drop it down to 6lbs and then do a buoyancy test after the dive.
I was taught is was best to check your buoyancy at the END of the dive, when the gear is at it's lightest (only reserve air in the tank) and all those pesky air bubbles are out of your gear.
Definitely shot weights. I have been dropping weight about every 20 dives and have discovered that I can now dive with no additional weight. However, I still add a couple of kilos to maintain trim.
So I am playing with my weighting but my biggest issue is actually logistical - I dive in Monterey California, and its almost exclusively shore dives. So changing wieght just to see is incredibly difficult. I may have to get a float but when you just swam 50 meters, after entering from shore, there's no place to dispose of your wieghts if you are heavy and its a wasted swim if you are light
You need a dive float/buoy, anchor or tie it off at the bottom. Keep various clip weights on it to use for trial. I dive dry in Monterey and usually carry about 28 lbs with steel 100. I'm 6' 175#
@@elefja1 Yeah I’ve done some playing around these last months. Still wet and using 22 lbs with my Zeagle. Just did trial and error. Got a new BPW to try out and dry suit is coming in next month so I expect I’ll be at the same weight too.
@@mikepark5884 Awesome! I went to BPW after renting and love it. I got the DUI Yukon 2 after getting tired of freezing my butt off there. I'd highly recommend that drysuit if you haven't decided already
I weight 110 Kg and I dive on a 5mm wetsuit with an underneath warm tshirt. I use 7-8 kg of weights 4 in the back of the belt and the remaining in front weight pockets of the BCD. I need to change to a smaller BCD as I lost weight and it is a little bit to big and thus the 8Kg
I use integrated weight pockets. In fresh water and a 7mm suit with boots, cap and gloves I still use 8 kilo of lead. But i have a lot of buoyancy fat :S
No shame for a little extra insulation for the cold water. What integration system do you use? and have you ever had any problems with it? All you hear about is when an integration system doesn't work, it'll be nice to hear someone that gets on with theirs.
@@SafeDiving I am using a Aqualung BCD with weight pockets which click in and have on the back two pockets. If that answers your question regarding the integration system? The last two pockets I tried the last time when diving and it helped me to stay horizontal more easy indeed. A few months ago I rented a same kind of system, but due to the many use of it, the click pocktes kept falling out and I ended up putting the weights in the side pockets with zipper. So the system can wear out, I believe. With the "click pockets" I find it more easy than a belt. As I have a belly....the belt often either gets more loose when getting deeper and feels like dropping off. Which makes the dive less relaxed. So if I go on holidays and dive, I need to make sure I loose weight, because rental equipment still often uses weight belts ;)
I currently use 7kg - however with the new diving gear I have, it is not enough. I weigh around 65kg however I hate the cold so use a 7mm wetsuit (which in Australia means I can go diving all year round - at the cost of becoming more buoyant). I have found that diving 10% more weight than what you think you need gives a buffer and is easily counteracted by using the BCD. If you can't sink with the BCD fully deflated and have to swim down, it is too little weight. Being heavier than lighter I found is a lot easy to compensate for, compared to being too light and buoyant. P.S. Subbed to the new channel, recognised you from Simply Scuba!
Agree. Which is why my instructor puts more weight on a student. Not just so that they stay down to do the skills, but to prevent them from losing control and shooting straight up. I've seen fun divers shooting straight up uncontrolled. I use 3kgs on the weight belt, two at the back one close to belly button. I used to have 4kg, but when i dived more and an instructor saw me constantly having to kick up during the safety stop, he advised me to drop one, and my air consumption just improved to his level in the very next dive. My experience is 3kg is much easier to manage without constantly having to dump air or fill air into the bcd. I thought about it a lot, but at the end of the day its importnt to remember, having less weight isnt the better. Its all about breathing, being able to breathe calmly and comfortably underwater and the weight and bcd is there to help.
I'm a giant fatty. I need 22 lbs in a jacket bcd, al80 tank, with no wet suite. In cold water I use a steel 120cf, heavy backplate dry suite and need about 24 lbs additional ballast. About the only benefit form being a fatty is I need almost no undergarment to dive in 8~10c water
interesting topic, i'm 177cm 80kg have been diving with 2 piece 7mm suit hood, gloves and boots, so lots of float! 80 al tank and carrying 2x 11lbs in bcd pockets 2x 2lbs in trim pocket and 4 x3lbs on the belt, 38 lbs all up and i know if i drop the two 2lbs i cant get submerged. About to make a big change with now one piece 7mm suit and steel tank. As a starting point how much weight should i drop from my belt? then ill do the float test with 50bar in tank after a dive. Thanks
Everyone has different buoyancy characteristics, but that sounds like an enormous amount of weight. Have you adjusted much since you left this message? For reference, my description is similar to yours: 175cm, 80kg, 7mm suit, and a steel tank. I carry 5kg (11lbs) in freshwater, and I'm fairly confident that I'm still a bit overweighted.
Given that there is sufficient air in your tank, it seems unlikely that you could reach a depth where you can't become positively buoyant if you had proper weighting on the surface? In effect you have in-sufficient volume remaining in your BC to overrule the reduction in buoyancy from you and your kit being squeezed smaller by the water pressure as you descend (ie your average density falls below that of the water you are in?). If you were over weighted and using say 75% of your BC volume to just stay on the surface then i could see there could be an issue, but surely most BCs are large enough these days to provide more than enough volume under most circumstances?
Oh yeah, A LOT of factors have to be bad to reach that point. But divers have died trying to reach the bottom of blue holes but couldn't make it back up due to weighting issues
@@SafeDiving I wasn't really saying that there weren't real and documented events with divers failing to gain enough positive buoyancy to ascend, but really wondering if in fact they simply failed to get to a positive buoyant state for some reason (clouded judgement due to narcosis ? slower than expected BC filling at depth? lack of air available to fill BC?) rather than it being an actual physically impossibility to get to positive condition? (ie not enough BC volume even when fully filled) One of those is a human problem the other an equipment problem!
@@maxtorque2277 I wonder that too! I've been obsessing about it after learning about Yuri Lipski. I think that as a rule of thumb a BDC lifts 15gk (at least the ones I checked), so how can it be that you get squeezed so much that it can't lift you? By my research muscle is not compressible, but fat is, I just don't know the factor. So, if you are overweight at surface you are very buoyant, go deep, much less buoyant, and then your BCD can't lift you, but for that you need to basically squeeze the volume of 15KG of water, which is A LOT. This weekend I went diving with 4kg and I was so neutrally buoyant I didn't touch my BCD in the whole dive. I'm 75kg, 175cm and not big nor muscular, so plenty of fat. I fully deflated my BDC when descending and at 24m I was perfect, but once I reached 5m I got shot up because my tank weighted less (20bar left). For your curiosity I dive in 3mm suit and at 10m I was properly weighted at 20bar. Definitely being narct and not dropping weights or pressing the purge button instead has to be a key factor (many accounts on this one), I just want to know the science of it to be safe. Maybe a channel called Safe Diving can do a video about it? :)
nice video. I might have a question: any advice on how to succeed in the bringing up an unconscious diver skill in full cold water gears? I've been failing this with my instructor many times now 😕
Lifting an unconcious diver is all about taking it slow and taking control. For me, my right arm is all about controlling the victim. My arm goes under their right shoulder and holds the reg in their mouth. This 'hug' from behind gives you good control of their body while keep the reg in their mouth. Left arm is all about buoyancy, my shoulder dump will sort out my buoyancy because it's usually open and I'll be in an upright position as we ascend. Unscrew the victims dump valve, grab their inflator and make your way to the surface at a sensible rate. The bulk of your exposure suits will make it harder but your primary focus is your right arm to control the victim and get them to the surface. If it's a real-world scenario you need to know that the victim's best chance of survival is on the surface. So don't bother holding them down for a safety stop, just get them to the surface as best you can so that emergency services can take over as soon as possible.
@@SafeDiving Thanks for the response! So you are only putting air in the victim BCD and use your left arm to put your weight on the victim's body ? When I do that I have a tendency to fall on my back and the victim in going up feet first. To fix it I have a tendency to kick fin a lot, failing the exercise. Do you know how to solve this?
@@aurelienbloch no offence but your instructor must be quite bad if you need to ask for the advice on the RU-vid. You may be getting your training in a club free of charge or paying for Padi or similar. In both scenarios the instructor is the one who should help you solve the issue you have. Ps. Mark described the procedure very well. My advice would be stop worrying about applying any pressure/weight to the casualty. You are in the water and this doesn't help. You just concentrate on the adding or dumping the air in the BCD of the casualty.
I wear 6 kg on weight belt (1+2+2+1 instead of 2+2+2 coz the middle one used to put too much force on my spinal cord as it was between tank & my lower back cause bit of pain eventually). I'm 170 cm tall & around 63 kg heavy, & I dove in Red Sea (Egypt).
